It seems lately there is always something getting in the way of, or making it difficult to work on the things I want to work on and even the things I need to work on. And if those things don’t get in the way then procrastination and bit of slacking take over and
contribute to the blockade.
As you might guess I had a bit of that this week. A migraine and a building ear infection conspired against me off and on for most of the week. In spite of that I did manage to get a little more work in on rigging Sticks.
I took a picture for the work on Sticks though it is not that exciting. I started working on the IK-FK blending. This went really smooth on the left side. I was able to set up the wire parameters and have the IK bone chain as well as the regular arm bone chain both move when I moved the IK goal. I was even able to use the slider tool, which is where I plugged the wire parameters into, to decrease the IK influence on the arm chain. That was fun.
As often happens, the other side did not go as smooth. It looked like it was ok all through the process of setting up the wire parameters. All those steps seemed to go just fine. When I went to test it, moving around the IK goal for that side things didn’t work right. The two bone chains weren’t moving together like they should and the slider adjustments had no impact. As best I can tell, I missed some constraint set up. There was a step to constrain the arm bones to their corresponding IK and FK bones. I’m not sure exactly which part I messed up, but deleting all the constraints and then creating them again seems to have fixed the problem.
And yet… I also ran into some weirdness with the elbow and forearm bones when I tried to freeze their transforms. I got some odd flipping. I adjusted the bones back where they should be and then tried the freeze transforms again. That seems to have done the
trick.
It looks like the next step should be to add the FK chain into the mix. Hopefully with the things worked out on the right arm(this was the trouble maker for the IK chain) it will go smoother. Of course the real challenge to getting that done is the self discipline and motivations to just do it. Butt in chair time, as they say.
With this next week being Holiday time it will certainly be a challenge to stay focused. I’ll do my best.
In addition to enjoying the time off, and working on Sticks, I will probably be spending some time with Disney Infinity. I saw a presentation by a group of people from Disney Interactive at the ZBrush Summit this year. The presentation was on how they make the
figures for production. They said that often the character model that is created for production is then used in the game, with a little polygon refinement. This makes looking at the characters on the splash screens kind of interesting. Aside from the character
modeling, one of the things that has me interesting is the Toy Box and the ability to make your own games within it. I was only mildly interested in that at first. However, after poking around at some of the components available, I think it could be really
interesting, enlightening and fun as a step for learning to create stand alone games.
So that’s what my Holiday week and weekend are looking like; working on Sticks, and maybe Greezbly, and poking around in Disney Infinity. I hope you all have a fun and relaxing Holiday weekend whichever Holiday or Holidays you may be celebrating.
Before I go, I would like to give a shout out to the friend from the day job, who gave me one of my cards today. What a wonderful gift.